Lands Beyond Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by Kin S. Law

  “What are you doing here?” Albion hollered.

  “We? We went out to resupply, while you lot were cavorting!” Cid snapped. His gray beard bristled, all two weeks’ worth, clinging to his face like a hedgehog.

  “Investigating!” Albion replied.

  “Right, red-eyes,” Alex remarked.

  Albion’s goggles slammed back down over his face. We were left staring in turns at each other’s stunned faces, and at the little longboat innocently floating in the dock space.

  “Well then,” I interjected. “Who’s left on the ship?”

  Hargreaves

  Some miles away, in the brig of The Huckleberry, I tucked a strand of golden hair back behind my ears and finished filing down the hinge on my prison. With a well-placed kick, I loosened it from its frame. I tried to do this very quietly, in case whoever stole the ship heard. Of course, kicking down a door is never a polite business.

  It hadn’t been difficult to deduce the theft of The ’Berry. Firstly, her usual crew were a loud, obnoxious bunch, whereas the ship now was silent as the grave. Second, whatever Godforsaken port they’d been docked at, I had seen its distinct brand of drunken villainy out of her tiny porthole. They were certainly capable of a ship-jacking. Just like Albion Clemens to dock at such a place, I had thought.

  In the passageway I took the time to tuck the file back securely away in my utilitarian braid.

  It was a very large ship. But I was well aware there were vacuum tubes and other machinery designed to transmit sounds. Stepping out into the hall, I paused as my boot heel clicked once on the hardwood deck. The helmswoman’s borrowed clothes fit well enough, but it was in a very flamboyant style, not at all in my comfort zone. The circle skirt and linen blouse were conservative enough. But I flat-out refused to wear the shoes—much too high, and showed too much ankle. Hargreaves in disguise was not Hargreaves the Detective Inspector of Scotland Yard.

  The opportunity was too good to miss for Hargreaves the Queen’s agent. With a real pirate vessel at my disposal, how far could I go towards tracking a presumably airborne Westminster? Prospects were good I could simply overpower the current thief and take over The ’Berry myself. I took off my boots, setting the socks gingerly on the cold wood. Good; no sound. I tied the laces together and slung the footwear onto my belt, then made my way wielding only my powers of detection.

  Though my intent was to simply arrive at the bridge, the journey proved counter-intuitive and bemusing. I had assumed the brig was in the lower parts of the ship, like The Gwain I visited nearly every Sunday. The logical thing was to proceed upward. Yet when I looked, I couldn’t find a single ladder or hatch in the ceilings. When I opened a trap in the deck floor, I discovered a cavernous space several decks deep. There was no catwalk or other passage. The door simply dropped off into empty air. Hard shipping crates lay below. Mysterious apparatus also seemed to occupy this spacious hold, or what I assumed was a hold. Befuddled and frustrated, I simply shut the portal and moved on.

  Some wandering later, I arrived at a conclusion; the brig was in the middle of the ship. It made some odd sort of sense, now that I thought about it. The Gwain and other ships in Her Majesty’s Navy had holdover design cues from seafaring ships. But on a dirigible, the best place to hold a prisoner was dead center, away from any place one might jump overboard and onto a rescuing ship.

  My circuit of the deck also showed the place was built along the lines of a giant egg, with the cavernous hold like a yolk within. The machinery was also familiar. I had taken raiding training. The narrow corridors and recessed panels were of a pressed helium vessel, a ship with her lift contained within her very bones. What I could not figure were the endless dead-ends, the locked doors, and the random nooks like empty bookshelves at all levels of the walls. Then there were the strings of objects, like fetishes or toys, running along every corridor. The empty doll smiles and brightly colored marbles shook me more than the fact I wasn’t getting anywhere. Finally, I had had enough.

  “Damn it, ship, how the blazes do I get to your bridge?” I gave in to the labyrinth, and abandoned stealth for release. The profanity felt good, at least.

  There was a rollicking click, as if the ship had actually heard me, and a panel I hadn’t seen before swung open on invisible hinges.

  “Doesn’t that just take the piss?” I grumbled, but shrugged and climbed through.

  Rosa

  “The ’Berry was triple-locked, in the engine room, the bridge, and in one of the capacitors randomly scattered through the ship!” Cid protested. “No simple hijacker could have stolen her!”

  I looked on nonchalantly, having taken the moment to paint my nails a bright saffron color. Being this gorgeous took a lot of work, and The ’Berry’s wheel had a spot that took the paint off my nails when I steered too hard to port.

  “Cid, when I say stay on the ship, I mean stay on the ship.” Albion sighed for the twentieth time.

  Matters were not helped by the close quarters—the longboat was not designed to hold seven people at once. We were packed like sardines. The thin plank hull shuddered and dipped despite Cid’s best efforts at the tiny steam engine in the rear. Her impromptu crew sniped and bickered despite my lowered neckline and liberally distributed headache specials.

  “Why don’t we go over what happened, Captain Clemens? Maybe something might come in useful when we confront this Kitty Desperado person,” Elric attempted to smooth the situation over.

  Albion looked up from the engine sniffer Cid had cobbled together, from the parcels meant for the ’Berry. The wad of arc bulbs and coils of copper zapped Albion now and again, when it caught the taste of The ’Berry’s steam in the air. The closer we got, the more the little static sparks bit Albion, which didn’t help the mood any.

  “Agreed,” Albion replied. “You were there, Rosa, when it happened.”

  For a moment, I was not quite sure how to shuffle through the deck of addled memories, but then I had it. The whole affair had started when Albion chanced on the attentions of a persistent Scottish firecracker. The little redhead was all right, just immature for Albion, not to mention lacking in the bow and stern. She was barely out of puberty.

  “All I saw,” I began, “was how you practically fell on the little fireball, and apologized by buying her a pint. How ridiculous a line was that, Albion?”

  “The girl is at least eight years my junior, Rosa; it was an honest mistake! We were all pretty wasted.”

  Everyone looked at the captain with glares of suspicious disgust, although I would have been ready to bet it was more for comedic value. None of us actually believed Albion was a cradle burglar, though he had burgled plenty of other things.

  “After that, I mentioned how no self-respecting pirate could keep their eyes off her long enough to trip over her. As an apology.”

  “You see how easily that can be misconstrued?” J’accuse!

  “Yes,” Albion said. “Yes, thank you for pointing out my drunken faux pas, I had no idea I did such things on my fifth whiskey sour.”

  “Go on then,” Cid grumped from back near the hot engine. Everyone crowded him in, trying to stay warm. The Channel wind cut cruelly round the bow of the flying longboat.

  “After I complimented her, she started following me around. I told her off, I tried to lose her in the whiskey catwalks, I even ran into a men-only bathhouse.”

  “The one near the cocktail bar, healing baths, strategic location,” Cockney Alex recalled.

  I could just see him, a huge blond bear, majestically reclining in water gone white with minerals and mingled sweat.

  “And,” Albion barreled on. “She managed to sneak in and steal my clothes. Left me a note saying she’d distributed them in the eleven Hook crawl pubs. She’d paid the barkeeps to give them back to me a piece at a time once I’d drunk a whole pint there. Took me four pubs to get my trousers back.”

  “So that was why you were doing the crawl. Why were you running from one to another like a bat out of hell?
”

  “For two reasons. One, I knew the longer I waited, the sooner the barkeeps would start selling off my things piece by piece. Two, Kitty was obviously playing for time. I just didn’t know what for. By the time I got the last piece back, I sort of collapsed behind the bar. Luckily I knew the owner, so they didn’t let anyone take my things.”

  The longboat shook once more, but this time, it was from the combined force of everyone aboard laughing.

  Hargreaves

  Having reached the bridge with little difficulty, I became fiercely conflicted. I had expected a gang of toughs to take me out along the way. I had even picked up a long wrench in preparation for hand-to-hand combat. At the very least, there ought to be one determined, skilled individual, perhaps a deserted veteran of some defunct paramilitary institution, hardened and cynical with the deaths of hundreds on his hands. What I never expected to find on the bridge was a child.

  At least, the girl seemed a child. Her hair was a brilliant burning red, the sort of brightness inversely proportionate to one’s age. Clothes several sizes too large for her short frame formed a sort of fog around her. From the shape of her neck, she had all the figure of a plank. When the girl moved, she seemed too gangly and doe-like for anything but a teenager.

  I sighed and set down the wrench. I walked into the middle of the bridge. The girl literally jumped when she saw me. She swiped a ceramic figurine—a dog having a wee—off the console and pitched it at me.

  “Blimey!” I yelled, dodging the missile.

  “Blimey yourself! I thought the ship was deserted,” the girl yelped.

  She continued to throw items with startling accuracy: an ancient sugar skull, a stuffed owl, a cup of pens raining arrows tipped with sharp, inky nibs. For a pirate bridge, the place was littered with dangerous knickknacks. Things hung all over the pipework, some with sharp corners. Fortunately, I was well trained for action under fire. I dove behind a console, whacking aside tchotchkes with my recovered wrench.

  “Hold it! What’s happened to Captain Clemens?” I demanded.

  One of the projectiles, a round cork ball, ricocheted between some touchy-looking toggles. It settled on and tripped one, causing the whole ship to shudder.

  “Hmmmm…” I muttered. I reached up and flicked a toggle with one neatly trimmed nail.

  “Whoaaaa!”

  Instantly, the whole ship shook and tipped over like a platter from a tripped waiter. Having prepared myself for it, I was instantly on my feet, marching toward the girl on the floor. It was an ideal Yard submission situation. The mark was on her face, her arms behind and ready for a cuffing. All I had to do was sit on the whelp and maybe tie her arms together with Miss Rosa’s belt. If worse came to worst, I would simply have to hold on until the girl gained enough composure to work out an arrangement.

  Much to my surprise, the girl twisted easily out of a hold that could break full-grown men’s arms, and socked me one in the face.

  Albion

  “It’s quiet…” Rosa whispered.

  I brushed her off my arm, since she wasn’t really afraid. If she was, she would touch the spot on her chest where a cameo brooch lay hidden in her corsetry. The black one, with the skull in the top hat. The one she thought I hadn’t noticed her worrying when I declined her invitations to drink or to help her navigate. A night under the stars with my very attractive Rosa Marija? I didn’t deserve it.

  Once I freed myself from my helmswoman, I pulled my goggles down tighter over my dark hair. Tension seemed to spark between the balustrades. Victoria might as well have been humming in her holster.

  We stood on The Huckleberry’s decks once more. Each of us stretched or writhed numbly on the floor from sleeping limbs. For some odd reason, the ship had been floating dead still, some miles south of the Hook. Something must have happened fairly recently, because Cid’s wacky gizmo had zapped me all the way here. I had thrown it overboard the second we saw The ’Berry. Damn thing had arched an enthusiastic blue streak all the way down. The sudden absence of its popping noises contributed to a feeling of stillness not suitable for our merry ship.

  “It’s quiet because you’re talking like a mouse,” replied—of all people—Elric. “Sorry. I have a problem with clichés.”

  “Let’s just find this girl already,” I said. “Nobody steals from the Burglar of Beijing.”

  Everyone groaned, but we marched our tingly feet over the deck and toward the forecastle. Even before we reached the bridge beneath it, the mists of the Channel parted to show a rather grumpy face staring out at us from the spacious windows.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “Impressive…” Cid’s hoary voice rasped.

  “Your little Inspector got out,” Rosa remarked.

  Rosa fanned out a quartet of knives in one hand, deadly little stilettos, but I shot her a glare. She didn’t know the bodies of the Inspector or this Kitty Desperado well enough for pressure point needles. Rosa put them away, but I put my hand on the hilt of my cutlass

  We marched as a group through the heavy bolted hatch and into the dry bridge, where we saw the darnedest thing.

  “Scotland Yard will take just about anybody, eh?” Cockney Alex sniped. “Even one with kinks like yours.”

  The Inspector sat on what looked like a pile of rags, with all the sleeves and pant legs tied together. It was still struggling, but every so often the blonde law enforcer would reach into it and twist something, extracting a piercing scream from within.

  “Ear,” the Inspector explained. “The Yard never taught us how to subdue a suspect who was double-jointed almost everywhere. I had to improvise. Oh, bollocks, how am I supposed to run off with the ship now?” she added.

  The Inspector hadn’t come out of it unscathed. Her borrowed clothes were scuffed and torn, and she sported a rather beautiful black eye. It clashed magnificently with her tussled gold hair.

  “Oy! That was my second-favorite bodice!” Rosa chastised.

  “Too bad it didn’t work. Good plan, very pirate of you,” I said, earning me a look full of vitriol from the Inspector’s one good eye. “Don’t knock it, you’ve already got the eye patch.”

  Through a fit of giggles, Rosa managed to step in with Auntie, and together, the three ladies undid the bonds. There were altogether too many people on the bridge now, and the girl we freed didn’t even try to escape. She just tumbled out of the bundle, all dense jumpers, violently orange hair, and a multitude of scarves. She sat there on the deck like a broken doll, with her enormous boots peeking out of a beribboned skirt.

  “Hello,” I said, kneeling in front of her. “I’m not drunk now. How did you steal my ship?”

  Rosa

  While Albion was talking with Kitty, Blair and I turned toward the Inspector, who seemed out of sorts. She dusted herself off, constantly stopping and picking at a rip here and there, as if she didn’t see the point.

  I sighed. “There’s a pile of clothes in the hold nobody knows what to do with, and a cleaning apparatus in the boiler room. You can take your pick from those,” I supplied. “Mind, it’s mostly men’s wear.”

  “Those would be easier to move in,” she said with a sigh. She leaned on my steering wheel to pick at a rip near her knee. “I see you are expecting me to stay. I suppose it is inevitable, if we are to solve the mystery of Westminster and recover your Captain Samuel.”

  This Hargreaves was making herself far more at home than I was comfortable with. She also had the legs off a giraffe, something I was seriously uncomfortable with.

  I rolled my eyes. “I suppose you came in useful.”

  “We will discuss the matter at length with the captain. I expect some sort of alliance can be reached?” she said, giving me a once-over disturbingly like a frisking. A nerve in my forehead began to twitch.

  At that point, Albion straightened up, with the orange girl clinging to his elbow. His goggles were back up, and the girl stared up at him with wide eyes. Now that she was free, she merely looked small and not a child. A
young woman, probably no more than nineteen.

  “Ladies, this is Kitty Desperado.”

  The story of Kitty Desperado was one we had heard hundreds of times scouring the bars of the Hook. She was one of the one of the faceless people orphaned during the last Great War, then only a babe in arms. A Welsh relief corporal had nearly tripped over her. She had been nestled in the debris of a bombed Glasgow hotel and clothed in a pile of evening gowns and hangers. Dropped from one of the still new Eastern Conglomerate dirigibles, steamcraft bombs left flesh melted off bone, pillars warped and broken in its wake. The closet and room had taken the brunt of the attack. A mother’s careful wrapping had saved the child. She had been wound in a dress meant to keep a lady protected near searing hot engines. These costly thermal materials were just then coming into fashion, driven by a fiercely progressive and practical new London femininity.

  The Great War had left plenty of boys and girls in Kitty’s unenviable circumstance. Britain’s deficits during the war were well documented, and it had been a miracle the military even managed to build their flagship dirigible fleet, the Knights of the Round, which won the Partnership the war. Orphans who could contribute nothing were summarily shipped to the filing cabinets of military orphanages, and as early as the age of six, were sent into the reserves as yeomen and engineering apprentices, where their deft fingers were made to mend the engines of war. From there it wasn’t long before Kitty had come into the unenviable circumstance of stealing for a living. It had to be said that she did try to steal from people who offended her. Or people who struck her fancy, handsome fellows who might come after her to get their property back.

  “You have no idea how attractive Captain Albion looked with his goggles, and his dashing coat, and those dimples…” Kitty was saying to me, later on the top deck of the ’Berry. I harrumphed, as if the idea of Albion’s dimples didn’t make me go soft inside.